Patrick Ryan Frank
/2011
A ROOMFUL OF WINDOWS
“The room is full of interruptions. They hold / each others’ hands, admire each others’ pearls.”
BY Patrick Ryan Frank - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 2001
current work
Under, Beneath, Below
There will be questions—what were the precautions
against collapse and noxious gasses; where
were the walkie-talkies and the spare headlamps;
why were we there, why did we go so deep?
And there’ll be vigils and widows, a man who’ll swear
he’s seen their ghosts or else an angel near
the access road. There will be services planned
and lawsuits settled, but none of that matters yet.
It’s only an hour into the second shift
and they’ve just started in the deepest shaft
when there’s a far-off murmur, then silence, then
a roar everywhere and the overhead lights
go black and someone shouts, “go back, go back,”
but back is gone somewhere behind the rock,
and the miners scream the way they might have said
that women scream. But far away, their women—
their wives and girlfriends, ex-wives—are quiet still,
working at the carpet store or daycare
or waking up from a nap, having dreamt
of nothing, not knowing the men below are throwing
themselves against the rubble, the rough loose rock,
and when the ventilators clog and cough
and the air is going and panic consumes itself
and there is just the dust and somehow time,
each of the miners hears a small bird sing,
even the ones who’d never recognize
a real canary, or know the English word
for “yellow” or what is happening to them now—
capillaries dilating, cascading cell death—
and though it’s dark and nothing is possible and none
of the men could say the word “canary” now,
they hear it singing somewhere near, there,
sharp and unlovely but it sings, it sings
because it cannot sleep, because it doesn’t see the cage,
it knows no better and there’s a weight in the throat,
because it has no choice, because, because.
a note from the author
I sometimes wish I were a nature poet. A landscape belongs to anybody who looks at it: it’ll say what the writer wants it to say; it’ll reflect what’s put in front of it. I write about people, and no person belongs to anyone. I can’t make my subjects mean anything but what they mean, and I don’t always know what that is.
When I wrote “A Roomful of Widows,” I was thinking about my own recently widowed mother. I’m never very comfortable writing about specific people; it can feel presumptuous, like answering a question meant for someone else. But I wanted to understand a version of that experience, how it might change the way the world looks, the way the world looks back. So I stepped away from the individual and into the abstracted archetype.
“Under, Beneath, Below” is a much more recent poem. I’m still interested in imagining an experience that I will almost definitely never have, hopefully with respect and empathy. Recently, though, I’ve been trying to trust the subject more, letting it go where it must, without trying to shape it into something clever or witty or “meaningful.” In many ways, this poem seems to share some of the materials of “A Roomful of Widows,” but it goes in a different direction, one that I didn’t quite expect.
Patrick Ryan Frank is the author of How the Losers Love What's Lost, which won the 2010 Intro Prize from Four Way Books; and The Opposite of People, to be published by Four Way Books in the fall of 2015. He was recently a Fulbright Fellow to Iceland. For more information, go to patrickryanfrank.com.
